The Sect Leader System

Benton had confidence that one pressing issue had been resolved. Having come to an agreement with the Lord and Protector of the mountain, a rank fourteen thunderbird, he didn’t think he’d have any problems with being attacked by anything more powerful than him.

Which meant he could focus on finding the materials that he required in order to make qi sources. In theory, such materials, being rich in qi, would stand out to his spiritual sense. And in reality, they probably did.

The problem was that, while his sense was fantastic at picking out a needle in the middle of a dessert, it wasn’t nearly so great at picking out a particular needle on a peak that was filled with the things. Everything in front of, below, and around him was steeped in qi. Every rock. Every blade of grass. Every tree. Every fallen twig. Everything.

For two days, he did everything he could think of. Flew far above the mountain trying to sense only the biggest sources. It worked to find him fantastically great treasures. Probably. But not the treasures he needed.

He tried flying really close to the ground and checking everything in detail. It took him hours to cover a couple of yards, and the mountain was simply ginormous.

Eventually, he hit on the idea of sorting for the qi elements that he needed, Shadow for example. From high above the mountain, unfortunately, even his advanced spiritual sense wasn’t good enough to detect a small speck of Shadow in the ocean of light. Moving closer to the ground yielded the same problem as before—it took forever to cover much ground. At least he could actually find sources of Shadow qi that were nearby, but none of them turned out to be what he needed. Mostly because they were too weak and a couple because the materials were contaminated with other elements.

And an additional problem reared its head—he easily could be passing up, say, an Ice treasure while fruitlessly searching for a Shadow one. And switching back and forth between all five that he was still searching for—having everything he needed for Fire either in hand or en route to the sect—slowed him down even further.

Needless to say, it was a frustrating two days, especially since he had gotten so accustomed to manipulating time. Because he was interacting with the world, sensing qi emanations from the surroundings, he couldn’t use either his Aura or his technique when far from the source of the qi. And it turned out that trying to include only part of the ground in his time bubble was possible if he got close enough, but it drained qi fast. Really fast. And even with the agreement with the thunderbird in place, he thought it would be incredibly idiotic to leave himself vulnerable by running his qi pool too low.

Basically, he spent most of those two days in real time, which made things even more irritating. Finally, though, Benton remembered something important—he was a cheating cheater who cheats.

“System,” he said internally, fearing the thunderbird might be able to hear him anywhere on the mountain, “can I make a Detect Treasure technique that fine tunes my spiritual sense to seek out only a specific thing that I tell it to?”